by Alfred Hayes
She reached up and twisted the nozzle of the air valve. A hiss. Night air, blowy, cold. From the great dark outside.
“Breathe,” she said. “Slowly. Deeply.”
I did.
She was all there was in the world. None of the passengers stirred. The magazines lay discarded on the sleeping and indifferent laps.
The pressure unclotted. The laboring diminished. I was able to swallow. The panic ended. It was anxiety. I wasn’t going to die. Not yet. The stewardess went away. Then something paled outside the window and it was morning.
3
At first I could not leave the hotel. I was on the eighth floor. I looked out of the window. I could see the dark wet rocks of Central Park and the stripped trees. The sky was the color of rain. The radiator hissed and then rattled and then hissed. The room was warm enough. I could not leave it. Not yet. It was a sort of well-furnished cave I had crawled into. To die: or to give birth. That’s what caves were for. Mine was opposite Central Park.
In the street a chauffeur polished a Cadillac that was parked at the opposite curb. A man passed. He was reading a tabloid. Then a woman, thin-legged, with a brown leather pocketbook. Then a man in a white raincoat. Rain was expected. I had no expectations. A young man went by, smoking. The chauffeur was still polishing his car. He was polishing the trunk of the Cadillac. He evidently started with the trunk. He did not expect rain or he had orders to polish the Cadillac no matter what the weather. A bald-headed man went by with an Afghan dog. He held the leash loosely and the dog squatted in the gutter. I was tired. I had not slept in the plane. I was afraid to go to sleep after the hallucination of not breathing. I thought I would go to sleep after a while. The chauffeur was now polishing the top of the Cadillac. A girl carrying a paper bag and muffled in a fur coat went by. A girl in high boots. Then three salesmen stopped at the curb. They had three attaché cases and each carried an umbrella. They all expected rain. I had been standing at the window with my topcoat on. Now I took it off. I took my tie off. I went into the bedroom. The bellhop had put my suitcase on a folding metal rack. I unpacked. After I unpacked I went back into the sitting room and I looked out of the window again. The chauffeur was polishing the door handles of the Cadillac. I sat down in one of the two green upholstered chairs in the sitting room. The suite was too expensive. But I was too tired to care about that. I would change later to something less expensive. From the chair only the sky was visible and the broken-toothed line of roofs. I should try to sleep. I stood up and looked out of the window. The chauffeur was inside the Cadillac and he was polishing the steering wheel and the dashboard.
4
It was dark when I awoke. I turned on all the lights in the sitting room. I would have dinner in the room, I thought.
There was an engraving on the hotel wall. Behind the TV antenna. It was an English hunting scene. I unhooked it from the picture hanger and took it down to examine it more closely.
Tom Moody, the caption said: The Whipper-In.
What was a whipper-in? Something to do with a fox-hunt. Old Tom, the Whipper-In, was dead. I read the verses:
Six crafty earth-stoppers in
hunter’s green dressed
Supported poor Tom to his last
place of rest.
I identified the six crafty earth-stoppers. They were the pall-bearers. On their shoulders was old dead Tom’s coffin.
His horse which he styled his
old soul next appeared
On whose forehead the brush
of his last fox upreared.
Brush, was it? Upreared, did it? I looked at the white horse. His old soul. I looked at the sylvan English scene. What woman wept, a child in her engraved arms, before the thatched cottage? She looked young. Old Tom’s what? Had he ever crouched at a window smoked from the burning turf and seen an obscene hand reach up and under to unhook her sylvan brassiere? Had Old Tom howled in his hunter’s green? Fled? Hidden? Sickened? Crippled? Finished?
Whip, Cap and Boots in a
trophy were bound
And here and there followed
an old straggling hound.
There was the hound. Definitely straggling.
Ah! No more of his voice yonder
vales will they trace
Nor the welkin resound with his
first burst in the chase.
Old Tom Moody. Lost his welkin. Shot his burst. Well: so had I. Goodbye, old whipper-in. If the bitches don’t get you, the welkin will. In small print, at the right-hand edge of the engraving, I read the farewell salute:
With Hei-gh over!
Now press him!
Tally-ho!
Tally-ho!
I hung the six crafty earth-stoppers back on the wall. I called room service and I ordered dinner. I turned off the lamp under which I had read the verses. I switched off all the other lights. The sitting room went back into darkness. Tally-ho! In the morning I’d go out. I could sense the city. Was I home? I closed my eyes. Lights, streets swept into me. The night outside teemed with assignations. I heard the home-bound trains. For it was, after all, my city. She had healed me in the past. Her crowds, like enormous blotters, had absorbed my life. Broken synagogue. Steaming manhole cover. Eternally revolving door. Asphalt chalked on with obscenities and children’s games and arrows mysteriously pointing nowhere. Decapitated, my floating head in the subway tunnel. Pressed, schoolbooks under my arm, lunch money in my corduroy pocket, secretive, moist with desire, in the morning rush-hour against some shopgirl’s warm impersonal breast. Thirty-five years. Yes. I’d given the city so much of my possible life. Surely, what was broken in me, the crippled sense of myself, would be restored. I’d heal among these brutal angles. I’d bathe in her like a spa. I’d convalesce in her indifferent arms. The waiter knocked on my hotel door.
5
The building was round. If not actually round, at least semi-circular. On discreet balconies, there were summer chairs and patio tables. I stared at the building in disbelief. Round! There had been nothing round in New York except the aquarium. The effect was slightly apparitional. Suddenly I realized I could not remember what had been on that corner before the round building was there. A policeman was stomping in the cold. He was standing beside a parking meter. As I approached the policeman, I realized he was very young. The buildings were now round and the policeman was very young.
“What is that thing?” I said to the policeman.
He looked up at the building.
He was really very young and he was cold and his hands were mittened.
“Looks like a jail, doesn’t it?” the policeman said.
I wasn’t sure what it looked like. It was simply an incredible something.
“What was there before? I can’t remember.”
“Tell you the truth,” the young policeman said, “I can’t remember myself. Some kinda building.”
Yes: some kinda building. Bank, or whorehouse, or athletic club. Historic or not. It didn’t matter and I couldn’t remember and the young policeman couldn’t either.
I walked down to what had been Sixth Avenue and was now the Avenue of the Americas. I’d walk slowly, I thought, and I would let the city come at me slowly. But New York does not come at you slowly. It isn’t a landscape. It comes at you simultaneously. It is constantly existing at the periphery of your sight. You are almost always seeing at the very edge of what you see something else that you are still not seeing. I had always known this even when it was a different city and I had lived in it and was now trying to live in it again. An enormous excavation gaped in the crosstown street. A municipal disembowelment. There were huge encrusted iron pipes buried in the clay and rock under the street. Some of the pipes were padded at their joints. Down in the earth among the intestinal metal were men in dull silver tin hats with tool belts strapped to their waists. The traffic was hopeless. I went into a delicatessen for breakfast. I had not walked far and yet I felt tired. My wife had always kept a red bottle of special vitamins in the medicine
cabinet. My wife. The medicine cabinet. It was a delicatessen I knew. It had been owned by a man named Max Gitlitz who had owned a delicatessen in the North Bronx when I had lived in Woodlawn. I did not see Max at the cash register. I had thought that even after ten years I would walk in and I would find Max Gitlitz at the cash register. I sat down. In red blazers, two men came into the delicatessen. Stitched on the blazers, I read: Vas you efer in Zinzinatti? I looked at the counter. Flat sides of corned beef lay on beds of parsley. A trussed roast chicken. Jars of stuffed olives. A roast beef settled among bright pimientoes. Knockwurst in strings. Pans of pickled tomatoes. Suspended salamis. I saw small green Spanish melons on a shelf. Twigs of green leaves had been placed between the melons. The waiter came. He was a recognizable waiter. I asked him about Max.
“Max is long gone,” the waiter said. “The place has been alterated three times.”
So there it was, alterated. I had the word. In my absence, in my exile, when I too was long gone, the place, of infinite extension, the remembered place, had been alterated. At least three times. Into what? These fiercer lights? This incredible roundness? These agonized excavations? These juvenescent policemen? I ate my breakfast and went out of the delicatessen.
I stood on a corner. Hands deep in my coat pockets. They were razing an old theatre. The wind blew. I watched the traffic. The great trucks. The delivery vans. Huge-wheeled. General Air Conditioning went by. Heineken Holland’s Proud Brew went by. Braked. Stopped. Waited. Shifted into grinding gear. Rolled. Gross & Co. went by. Brunckhorst’s Boar’s Head Brand Provisions went by. Olin’s Rent-A-Truck went by. Braked. Stopped. Waited. Shifted into grinding gear. Rolled. Krome-coat Brand Cast Coated Paper went by. K. Masucci Bros. went by.
What would they erect when the old theatre was gone, iron-balled into yesterday? Would it be triangular? Hexagonal? Would it spiral, thrust, vault, leap, would it pierce, finally, the smoggy orifice? Transfix from beneath a straddling heaven? I began to walk again.
The four Negroes were in a doorway. The sky had darkened. It was now late in the afternoon and it had turned colder. The four Negroes in the doorway were shivering and stomping their feet. They were standing in the doorway like a musical quartet. The two shorter ones in front and the two taller ones behind them. They all wore long black overcoats that were frayed. The overcoats had frayed velvet collars and were turned up. I leaned into the wind. I had walked all afternoon and I was going back to the hotel. As I got closer to the Negroes in the doorway I heard one of the taller ones in the quartet call softly: “Come here, Lulu.” I was passing them now. The wind swept bitterly around the corner. Now one of the short ones called: “Come here, Lulu baby.” I went around the corner. It was going to snow.
6
But it did not snow. It would snow later. New York was going to be buried in snow and it would be in the buried city that I would make love to Aurora. In the whiteness. In the white silence. Now the wind died and it did not snow. I read the weather reports carefully in the late paper. The sun would rise at 7:05. It would set at 4:29 p.m. The following day the sun would rise at 7:06. It was the only unequivocal thing in the paper. We were in the last quarter of the new moon. Twelve inches of snow had already fallen at West Yellowstone in Montana. Owyhee, in northeast Nevada, had had six inches of snow. The nation was experiencing, along with the wars, the scandals and the crimes, coastal rains and mountain snow. Here, outside the hotel window, a gray drizzle fell.
O.
F.W.
K.
Leonard R.
B.
I wrote the list of initials carefully on the sheet of hotel stationery. I was sitting at the escritoire. I imagined the hotel inventory called it an escritoire. The initials were the initials of friends who had died. It was because now with the rain falling I was thinking of what friends there were to telephone and how few I had had and of those few how almost none remained. They had all been close to my age, or a little younger, when they died.
O.
F.W.
K.
Leonard R.
B.
They had died in different ways. O. in a hospital; cancer; F.W. under the stairs in a tenement where the women usually kept their baby carriages; suicide; B. had sat up in bed one night and coughed: a catastrophic cough; K. of booze; Leonard R. in a hot bath. Their deaths had not thinned the crowds on Broadway: nevertheless, without them, the city was emptier. It was as though they had, as when I was a boy, been sent away for the summer; I was left alone to play cards on the tenement stoop. Except, of course, they would not be coming home after Labor Day.
O.
F.W.
K.
Leonard R.
B.
They had all died unexpectedly. To us; to themselves, too. One was somewhere else and a friend died. I abruptly realized there had been no last words. I did not know what any of them had said, if they had said anything at all, just before they died. My friends, my generation, seemed to die unexpectedly and in silence. A quick, or a slightly prolonged, suffering, of a kind different from the way they had suffered before, had taken place, attended by nurses, pierced by needles, fed by tubes, and then, whatever it was or had been for fifty years, in O.’s case fifty-six, in Leonard R.’s fifty-three, B. had almost reached sixty, darkened, and stopped being. And there were no deathbed speeches. Nothing memorable took place. They had coughed, and died; a vein had gouted, and they had died; an abnormal distension had taken place, and they had died. Something had looked out of their eyes. I knew my friends: the silence in which they died had been falling on them for a long time, and at the end, in the intervals between the pain and the sedatives, something had looked out of their eyes. There had been nothing to say, not even to their children, and they had had children. There had been nothing to pass on. No admonition; no counsel; no summing up at all. Silence had proliferated in them with possibly the same completeness as the disease which had killed some of them and which may be, after all, the disease of silence. I stood up and walked to the window and looked out at the dangerous park. Where did one start when it was no longer clear how one had gotten to where one was now? By what folly? By what minute surrenders? By what self-neglect? Up in the Bronx there was an old woman. Perhaps that was the point at which to start. Because one had to. At precisely 7:05 the sun would rise. As over a battlefield. As over a junkyard. As over a devastated star.
7
The little old woman sat in the straight-backed chair. I could remember the sturdy shoes: how thin the ankles had become: she was so tiny: her feet scarcely touched the floor. Aunt Dora was eighty-six years old. The house was very clean. She had lived in the same tiny flat for twenty-seven years. She was smiling at me. Asher! she had cried when I had rung the bell. She was very pleased I had come to see her. My coming at all was a surprise.
“Oh, my dear,” she said. “What can I tell you?”
Years before at Christmas I had bought the TV set that stood in her living room. The set, she informed me, still worked perfectly. I was still being thanked for it. She had always been energetic. Those sturdy shoes had gone to so many markets.
“Oh, my dear, what can I tell you?”
That every Monday there were injections from Dr. Benjamin. Dr. Benjamin’s offices were across the street. She did not have far to go in the cold. She felt safer with the doctor so close.
We mustn’t grumble, Aunt Dora said. Her hands were clasped in her lap. She was littler than I remembered. There was a strange gray patch of skin on her upper lip. Her fingers bent arthritically.
In Memorial Hospital, after the prostate operation, after the urinary infection, after the successive tremors of the heart, the old upholsterer her husband had tried to jump out of the hospital window. May he rest in peace. She was penniless because all the insurance money had been used to pay for the operations.
“Oh, my dear, what can I tell you? I’ve had my share.”
She bustled about, and made tea. In the bedroom the double bed was neatly covered
with a blue chenille bedspread. When you are old there is too much room even when the bed is not too wide and the flat is tiny. I sat in the kitchen. I put the slice of lemon in my tea. Aunt Dora was afraid she had bored me with her miseries. I had come across the continent and here she was talking of what it is better not to talk about. How was my wife? How was my work? How was I?
A desire to tell this little old woman all that was wrong sprang to my lips. To confess that all was not well. That my wife was not fine. That my work did not exist. But I could not. I was, after all, their famous man. My name was imprinted there: my photograph had appeared here. I had escaped their common fate. Or so they thought. So poor Aunt Dora thought. Asher was well off: Asher lived in a place of perpetual sunshine: Asher had a fine wife. Oh, my dear, I should have said, as Aunt Dora said, what is there to tell? I was condemned to a fiction of myself. To a false well-being. To a counterfeit success. I smiled. My wife was fine, I said, I expected to be working soon, I was all right. I drank the hot lemon-flavored tea. We went back into the living room. Again we sat in the old straight-backed chairs that many years ago my uncle had upholstered. I could remember him with the mouthful of brass tacks spitting them into the palm of his hand and lifting them with the magnetized head of his hammer.
In the nice weather Aunt Dora went out and sat with the women of the neighborhood in the small park near the Christian Science Reading Center. Her daughter who was now as old as I was had married a traveling salesman. The daughter had one son. There was a photograph on a small table near the wall. It was a photograph of the son, Michael. My family has features which appear in all our faces. We distantly resemble each other. I put the photograph in its silvered frame down. Aunt Dora was watching me anxiously. Michael lived downtown. In some sort of studio. Aunt Dora sighed. Michael, too, wanted to write.
